The Oil Drum

178 comments on Sunday evening open thread

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Movie Guy on February 27, 2006 - 10:22am

xuewen,

I appreciate your time and effort. My remarks below correspond to your number ordering.

You stated some basic information that we all know, but in my judgment you miss the point on how the planet Earth works. It's a heat pump. There are three principle thermostat locations. Two ice coolers (cold box refrigerators) - northern polar cap and southern polar cap, and an interrupter - the Isthmus of Panama. Those are the critical components that influence the heat pump function of the planet. If those thermostat locations do not perform their current functions, the planet's climate shifts radically. It's not much more complicated than that, other than sun radiation patterns and the heat sink capacity of the oceans and certain land masses. Yes, everything is influencing the heat pump, but its primary components are as stated.
That's not a bad answer overall. But you glossed over hydrology and pump GPM considerations. That's another factor. Yes, there will be heat exchange at the polar wherever the hydro mechanical is being accomplished. That effort could very well lead to additional snowfalls, so (if true) that needs to be factored in. If the hydro mechanical stimulated more snowfall, that would be a positive benefit. Of course, there are other ways to help induce greater snowfall. You also excluded the consideration of natural flow force potential for moving fluids through a pipeline. There may be a way to tap currents to drive some of the flow. It would help to have a few pipeline specialists address some of the finer points of pipeline operations such as the pumping station at Delta Junction, Alaska. Have you ever watched a snow generation system work? I'm surprised that no one mentioned that technology. Of course, wet bulb is the issue there.
I disagree with your position on this one. I have followed some of the Russian work on this technology applications since the early 1970s. They were not just wasting their time. Climatic influence is apparently well within reach. I have seen some papers that discuss matters that I will not go into (divulge), but I am not convinced that this approach is a wasted consideration. That's all I will say. There are a few ongoing projects that appear to support the general theory and available technologies in practical applications.
I agree with many of the basic comments you shared. I do not agree with your notion that we "cannot decrease the temperature of the sky (this is what controls radiative heat loss)". That's not correct technically nor with regard to Earth's recent history to the best of my knowledge. You also didn't mention the heat sink capacity of the oceans and seas, and how events create temperature variations in those pools of water. I suggest that the oceans are of primary consideration, not the atmosphere in the sky. The ability of sea salt water to hold heat is significantly larger than that of the sky. There is no comparison, actually. This all goes back to basic knowledge of heat pumps and heat sinks. There are, moreover, a number of ways to transfer heat back, deep, into the Earth. Of course, we haven't explored that potential.
Scale is not an obstacle for my strategic thinking. It's a secondary consideration. As to cost, how much are the cities and infrastructure along the East Coast worth? This is a question raised by Stormy that no one to my knowledge bothered to answer.

I do appreciate your fine effort. Thanks, xuewen.
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xuewen on February 28, 2006 - 7:49am

Hello Movie Guy,

I have some further responses for you, retaining the numbering sequence we appear have adopted.

The earth is NOT a heat pump! A heat pump takes energy and uses it to move heat from a cold temperature to a higher temperature, expelling it along with the energy that was consumed. I believe you may have a fundamental misunderstanding about why the poles are cold. Unlike your domestic freezer, they are not cold because of the action of a heat pump. Like your house on a cold day, they are cold because heat naturally flows to something that is even colder. In the case of the North Pole, what is this thing that's even colder? The sky (NOT the atmosphere). The night sky has a temperature of about 3-4 Kelvins, as close to absolute zero as makes no difference. Heat is continually lost from the planet to the sky by thermal radiation - to prove this is as simple as drawing a system boundary around the earth. Energy comes in from the sun, and because the earth's state is more or less at equilibrium, more or less exactly the same amount of energy is radiated to space. Energy cannot be created or destroyed, it all goes somewhere. The reason why the poles are so much colder than the rest of the planet is simply that they receive a whole lot less solar energy per square meter than the rest of the planet (but their heat loss rate is [more of less] comparable).
<regarding hydrology and pumping> I didn't "gloss over" it. It's irrelevant to the calculation because I'm talking about energy balance considerations - thermodynamics. If you want to consider the necessity of pumping, it won't be as large as the heat of fusion considerations, but will only increase the calculated energy requirements and render the proposal even more impossible (is that like something being larger than infinity?). Snowfall? Snow falling on the ice doesn't help because it doesn't increase the surface area of the polar cap. Snow falling on the ocean also doesn't help because it melts immediately. The polar caps grow when the temperature gets low enough to freeze the top of the sea. Making artificial snow does not remove any heat from the system (it actually adds a small amount because of the pumping energy used) and so does not help the situation.
<re: "scaler magnetics" and technology vs energy> I'm sorry, but you're flat wrong. Electromagnetics of any kind ARE NOT energy sources, they simply convert energy from one form to another. They are a technology. Technology is not the same kind of thing as energy. To claim otherwise is equivalent to claiming to have a perpetual motion machine. If you want to make such a claim you would not only need to provide some sort of logical argument, evidence or at least references, but they would have to be very, VERY good arguments, evidence, AND references. This confusion between technology and energy seems to be the source of a great deal of (potentially fatal) muddled thinking in our society, particularly from the economics side (sorry LouGrinzo).
I said sky, not atmosphere. They are not the same thing. The night sky has a temperature of around 3-4 Kelvins. And no, its temperature has not changed over any time scale that is of geological interest to humans. The beauty of the first law of thermodynamics, as I'm sure you are aware, is that it applies to all systems regardless of whatever the hell it is that goes on inside the system. So the complexities of atmosphere, oceans etc don't make a lick of difference to my argument. Pumping heat into the earth would take at least as much energy as the heat you are trying to pump, and it wouldn't stay where it's put.
<re: scale being a secondary consideration> I'm surprised you aren't dead. For me, considerations of mass and velocity scales are what stop me from stepping out into moving traffic or jumping from heights much more than a meter or two. As to cost, well I haven't considered it yet. It's hardly worthwhile costing something that we know is not physically possible. Physics trumps engineering and economics. ie if something is not physically (eg, thermodynamically) possible, it can't be engineered no matter how hard you try, and no matter how much money you throw at it. [BTW, what's really interesting I think is that it appears that mathematics trumps physics... ]